Building your own platform services (control versus delegation)
Another key decision for enterprises is how to choose your platform:
- Should I be building my own platform?
- Should I subscribe to an existing platform and develop my application on top of it?
This decision boils down to the factor how do you see technology, as an enabler (control) or a differentiator (delegation)?
At the core, all companies are technology companies. But the question is whether controlling technology provides you with the additional edge over your competition, or helps build a moat that can potentially discourage new players from coming. Let's take a couple of examples and see how it plays out:
- If you are to planning to compete with a company such as Amazon in the retail space, you need to have deep pockets. The low margin business of Amazon retails is bankrolled by profitable business from AWS. So, unless you have a sugar daddy or alternate revenue models, competing with Amazon is not going to be easy. But assuming...